The Merry (Mirrie) Dancers

This morning's post takes its title from an old Scots name for the aurora borealis. Clear, cold winter nights are the best times for watching the grandest light show of them all, also for capturing the Milky Way with a lens. Beau and I have been doing that very thing for years. Several powerful solar flares occurred last week, and the auroras generated by the resulting geomagnetic storms were absolutely breathtaking for a night or two. They lit up the sky and made us feel like dancing too.

Years ago, my soulmate and I were driving along a country road in the Lanark highlands on a cold winter night when a particularly vivid performance of the aurora took place right over our heads. We stopped to watch it, and I have never forgotten the gently shifting curtain of dancing colour in every hue of the rainbow.

In Scotland, the aurorae are often called "the mirrie dancers" in reference to their shifting, shimmering motion in the night sky. The old Scots word "mirrie" means "to tingle, shimmer, or quiver" and probably originates in the Norn language, a descendent of Old Norse spoken in the Orkney and Shetland islands until the middle of the 19th century. The further north one travels, the more dazzling the auroras are, and the northern Scottish islands get some whoppers.  Merry (not mirrie) is a modern mispronunciation of the old adjective, and I like that too. We need all the merriment we can get in this dark time of the year.

There is also another Scots term for the aurora, "Na Fir-chlis" (the Nimble Men"). According to folklore, the nimble ones are combative, outcast faeries who wage a never-ending battle in the night skies above the earth. From down here on the surface, their war games look like dancing lights.

While the most spectacular aurora showings are in places like northern Scotland, Iceland, Finland, Norway, Greenland and Canada's high Arctic, there are times when we don't do too badly in the eastern Ontario highlands either. We call them "the northern lights", and they certainly put on a show last week. 

There is nothing like sky dancers, folklore and etymology to start off a dreary November day. Ditto a good cup of coffee. Winter is here, no doubt about it.

Sequestered, Week 319 (CCXIX)

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

How is one to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in life, when one finds darkness not only in one’s culture but within oneself? If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the midst of such paradox. One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse. There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.

Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams

The Beech Mother, First Snow

Friday Ramble - Winter

This week's word hails from the Old English winter (plural wintru) meaning "the wet season". That may seem odd, but winter is usually the wettest season of the year. There are a few contenders for the word's Proto-Indo-European (PIE) origins, the most popular being the PIE root forms *wend- and *wed- meaning "wet". Other possibilities include the PIE roots *wind- meaning "white", and *gheim- meaning cold. The latter forms part of the words chimera and hibernate, also the name of mightiest mountain range of them all, the Himalayas. Their name combines the Sanskrit words hima (snow) and ālaya (dwelling), thus, "abode of snow".

Whether or not the season involves snow and icy temperatures or just a hatful of rain, most cultures on island earth have a word for it, and it has a singular place in our thoughts, dancing in a stronger light than its other, more moderate kin. Those of us who live in the north tend to predicate our agricultural and culinary activities in spring, summer and autumn on making ready for the long white season.

For the Celts, winter began at Samhain (October 31) and ended on Imbolc (February 1) when springtime arrived. The Winter Solstice on or about December 21 marked the shortest day and longest night of the year, and it was a rowdy celebration of the highest order. From that day onward, the light of the sun would return, a little more every day until the Summer Solstice in June. The legendary King Arthur was believed to have been born on the Winter Solstice, and Druids sometimes refer to the Winter Solstice as Alban Arthuan ("The Light of Arthur").

Rugged northerners that they were, the Norse knew all about winter. They counted their years in winters and thought the world would end after the mightiest winter (the fimbulvetr) of them all. Their beliefs, compiled in the 13th century Icelandic Edda, contain a wealth of oral material from much earlier sources, and the collection is the main source of everything we know about Norse literature, beliefs, customs, deities and creation mythologies. One of these days, I will work my way through the Edda again, and the idea of doing it in winter seems appropriate.

It all comes down to cosmic balance. We owe the lineaments of our existence in the Great Round to a tilt in the earth's axis as it spins merrily in space. When winter reigns here in the north, lands south of the equator are cavorting in summer, and I cling to that thought in the depths of frozen January. Somewhere in the world, it is warm and sunny, and sentient creatures are kicking up their heels in the light.

Winter gifts us with the most brilliantly blue skies of the calendar year by day, and the most spectacular stellar expanses by night. There is nothing to compare with the sun shining through frosted trees on morning walks, the sound of falling snow in the woods. The darkness at night is intense, and the stars seem so close one can almost reach up and touch them. Stargazy is the word, and by that I do not mean a Cornish fish pie, although they are lovely! Backyard winter astronomy is bone chilling stuff, but I would not miss it for anything in the great wide world.

When winter beckons, I think about moving further south, but it isn't going to happen. Garden catalogues and canisters of wild bird seed take up residence on every surface in the house. I pile up books and music and tea, stir curries, stews and cauldrons of soup, ponder the ranks of pickles and chutneys in my larder. My boots, skis and snowshoes are trotted out and made ready for treks in the woods. Rambles will be brief this winter (that pesky ice), but I will be taking them for sure, and Beau will be with me every step of the way, clad in one of his natty parkas.

There is clarity and comfort in knowing that long after I am gone, the winter fields and forests of the eastern Ontario highlands will remain, their snows unmarred by the clumsy footprints of this old hen. To know the north woods, one has to wander through them in winter, spend hours tracing the shapes of sleeping trees with eyes and lens, listen to snow falling among them, perhaps become a tree herself.

Thursday Poem - Instructions in Magick

You don’t need candles,
only the small slim flame in yourself,
the unrevealed passion
that drives you to rise on winter mornings
remembering summer nights.

You don’t need incense,
only the lingering fragrance
of the life that has gone before,
stew cooking on an open fire,
the good stars, the clean breeze,
the warmth of animals breathing in the dark.

You don’t need a cauldron,
only your woman’s body,
where so many of men’s fine ideas
are translated into life.

You don’t need a wand, hazelwood or oak,
only to follow the subtle and impish
leafy green fellow
who beckons you into the forest,
the one who goes dancing
and playing his flute
through imperial trees.

And you don’t need the salt of earth.
You will taste that soon enough.

These things are the trappings,
the tortoise shell, the wolf skin,

the blazoned shield.
It’s what’s inside, the star of becoming.
With that ablaze, you have everything

you need to conjure up new worlds.

Dolores Stewart, from The Nature of Things
(Reprinted with my late friend's permission. It is probably my favourite)

Wordless Wednesday - The Trail

Gold and Pewter

Occasionally the morning sun sparks gold for a minute or so in the pewter sky, and it slants weakly through the village grove where we stand and shiver. There is freshly fallen snow underfoot and on the whiskery trees overhead.

The wind has brushed the white stuff away from the frozen puddle near our feet, and the pine needles, acorns and leaves held fast in the ice twinkle and glitter and flash. The chance meeting of the elements forges a pleasing image, but everything is muted and foggy this morning because the earth is still much warmer than the air above it. The damp cold penetrates right through to the bones.

November finds us perched between Samhain (Hallows) festivities and the frantic scurryings of Yule. Migratory species like loons and herons have been gone for weeks, and only few small flocks of Canada geese remain in local fields. Nights are subzero, and most of the geese have shrugged their wings and flown south.

The landscape always seems empty at this time of the year, a pallid sepia study carpeted with fresh snow and crunchy field grasses, crowned from here to there with skeletal trees. It is beautiful for all that. Never mind shopping malls with their towering gift displays and trite holiday carols, this is where it is at.

Here we go again, another long white season in which the doddering scribe/artist wraps up in every warm garment she possesses, slings a camera around her neck, crams her pockets with poo bags and dog biscuits and goes off with her canine companion to plumb the mysteries of winter. When she returns home later, she will move autumn's vibrant images from her computer to an archival DVD, and she will create a new folder called "Winter".

Sequestered, Week 318 (CCCXVIII)

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

The true language of these worlds opens from the heart of a story that is being shared between species. For us to be restored to the fabric of this Earth, we are bidden to enter this tale once again through its many modes of telling, to listen through the ears of others to the mystery of creation, with its continually changing patterns, and to take part once again in the integral weave of the narrative. Might we not hear our true names if we learn to listen through the ears of Others? Through language, one can exchange one's self with other beings and in this way establish an ever-widening circle of existence.

Joan Halifax, The Fruitful Darkness

The Wind and the Rain

Friday Ramble - Twenty Years and Counting

Last Sunday morning, clocks in the village turned back an hour, and Daylight Saving Time waved goodbye until next year. Its departure marked the end of gardening and gathering, and it also marked twenty years of blogging here. I like the fact that the two events are aligned after a fashion.

It seems fitting that the Beech Mother should make an appearance at the top of this morning's post. For many years, we (Beau and I) have passed through her alcove on our early morning walks, and we greet her and give her a pat whenever we do. She is beautiful in all seasons but particularly in late autumn and early winter.

For twenty years, I have been logging on here mornings and posting an image or two. Before that, there were notebooks - I still have a whole shelf of them that I never got around to using. Some days, I manage a few paragraphs to go along with the visual elements, and occasionally I spill my cuppa on the keyboard. I am still astonished that I had the cheek to set this place up, let alone post faithfully for twenty years in a row. Once in a while I am OK with my efforts, but mostly I am not. When I look at stuff I wrote here years ago, I am appalled. Yuck.

However lacking they are (and they are certainly that), these are my morning pages, and chances are they will remain pretty much as they are in the coming year. There may be a bit of font and banner tinkering, but that is all. I don't foresee significant changes to this place, and I expect blogging life will simply go on as it has been doing so far, photos and scribblings and quotations and bits of poetry.

In late November of 2019, my soulmate passed away after a fierce and "no holds barred" battle with pancreatic cancer, and life without him is still rough going. Most of the time, I feel as though I am just clinging to the wreckage and paddling frantically to stay afloat, but I keep lurching forward, whatever it takes. I give thanks for my tribe and Beau, for wild kin and trees, for sisters of the heart, for good neighbors and friends. I could not have gotten here without all of you.

Big life and health stuff notwithstanding, it's good to be here (most of the time anyway) and wrapped up in the toings and froings of what I like to call "the Great Round". Beau and I stay busy, and we go rambling every day and in all weathers. Sometimes, I just tuck the cell phone in my pocket (along with a few of those little green bags), and off we go, our collars turned up against the wind.

We wander along at our own pace, conversing with the great maples and beech mothers, watching leaves dance in the woods, feasting our eyes on the sun going down like a ball of fire over the river, on skies alight with winter stars and moons that seem almost close enough to reach up and touch. My departed love is always with us in spirit, resting easy in a pocket of my tatty old jacket, the one closest to my heart. The man loved rambling, and he was usually the first person out the door.

The road goes ever on, and there is magic everywhere if we have the eyes to see it, the wits to acknowledge it, the grace and humility and plain old human decency to show respect and say thank you. The small adventures of our wanderings will continue to make their way here every morning and get spilled out on the computer screen with a bad photo or two and a whole rucksack of wonder. The world is an achingly beautiful place, and sometimes an image says everything that needs to be said, all by itself, no words needed from this Old Thing. Mary Oliver said it best:

The years to come – this is a promise –
will grant you ample time

to try the difficult steps in the empire of

thought where you seek for the shining

proofs you think you must have.

But nothing you ever understand

will be sweeter, or more binding,

than this deep affinity between
your eyes and the world.

(excerpt from "Terns")

In another poem, she wrote that sometimes one needs only to stand wherever she is to be blessed, and that is something I try to keep in mind as Beau and I are tottering along together. Thank you for your kind thoughts and healing energies, your comments and cards and letters, for journeying along with me this year. You are treasured more than you know, and if my fingers were working, I would write each and every one of you. Be well. Be peaceable. Be kind to each other. Be happy.

Thursday Poem - Sometimes I am Startled Out of Myself,

like this morning, when the wild geese came squawking,
flapping their rusty hinges, and something about their trek
across the sky made me think about my life, the places
of brokenness, the places of sorrow, the places where grief
has strung me out to dry. And then the geese come calling,
the leader falling back when tired, another taking her place.
Hope is borne on wings. Look at the trees. They turn to gold
for a brief while, then lose it all each November.
Through the cold months, they stand, take the worst
weather has to offer. And still, they put out shy green leaves
come April, come May. The geese glide over the cornfields,
land on the pond with its sedges and reeds.
You do not have to be wise. Even a goose knows how to find
shelter, where the corn still lies in the stubble and dried stalks.
All we do is pass through here, the best way we can.
They stitch up the sky, and it is whole again.

Barbara Crooker, from Radiance

Wordless Wednesday - Held

Shining Through

Before the first snowfall of the season, I always wonder how I am going to survive another winter without the vibrant colours of other seasons, and I feel a vague anxiety (sometimes sheer panic) thinking about the long, dark months to come. Shame on me for harboring such morose and mutinous thoughts. I should know better.

There are turnings and transformations everywhere: feathery ice archipelagos in highland rivers as they freeze over, icicles dangling from trees along the shore, field grasses poking their silvery heads out of drifts, melt water falling from the roof and freezing again in midair, fallen leaves with frosty grasses shining through them.

Everything my cronish eye lights on is food for notebook and lens, a fine thing since I am unable to wander as far as I once did. There are so many years of memories of winter rambles to revisit... I remember the hollow sound of the north wind moving down the gorge above the frozen lake, snow crunching pleasingly under my feet on the trail, the sussurus of flurries falling in the woods on a quiet day. I remember the sprucey fragrance given off by the snowbound evergreens in my favorite grove, how snowflakes tasted when I caught them on my tongue.

And winter's breathtaking nights, velvety black and filled with stars from here to there...  How can one not be dazzled and uplifted by lambent winter moons and the countless constellations dancing over one's head on clear nights. Sometimes, the stars seem almost close enough to reach up and touch. The season is a fabulous treat for backyard astronomers and stargazey types like this old hen. 

Absent the vibrant colors dancing on the earth's palette at other times, winter's gifts are paler hues, swirling shapes and glittering patterns. Each and every one is exquisite. Outdoors, the blues and golds on offer are sumptuous. Indoors, old window panes, heaps of books, bowls of fruit and cups of tea beckon. So does the sunlight coming through the window in a friend's farmhouse. I can do this, yes, I can.

Sequestered, Week 318 (CCCXVIII)

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

Do you see how an act is not, as young men think, like a rock that one picks up and throws, and it hits or misses, and that's the end of it. When that rock is lifted, the earth is lighter; the hand that bears it heavier. When it is thrown, the circuits of the stars respond, and where it strikes or falls, the universe is changed. On every act the balance of the whole depends. The winds and seas, the powers of water and earth and light, all that these do, and all that the beasts and green things do, is well done, and rightly done. All these act within the Equilibrium. From the hurricane and the great whale's sounding to the fall of a dry leaf and the gnat's flight, all they do is done within the balance of the whole.

But we, insofar as we have power over the world and over one another, we must learn to do what the leaf and the whale and the wind do of their own nature. We must learn to keep the balance. Having intelligence, we must not act in ignorance. Having choice, we must not act without responsibility.

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore

Merry Samhain/Hallowmas

Merry Samhain/Hallowmas

Happy November!

Friday Ramble - Samhain (Halloween) Thoughts

Here we are again at my favorite festive observance in the whole turning year. This is the eve of Samhain, or in popular parlance, Halloween.

On morning walks, there's a chill in the air that cannot be ignored. Daylight arrives later with every passing day, and dusk makes an earlier appearance, village street lamps turning themselves on one by one, hours before they used to. The shorter days and longer nights are all too apparent to a crone's fierce and gimlet eye, at least to this crone's eye. How did we get here so swiftly?

The last days of October have a beauty all their own. In the great wide world, crops and fruit have been gathered in and stored, farm animals tucked into barns, stables and coops readied for the long white season. Rail fences wear frost crystals, and nearby field grasses crunch pleasingly underfoot. Wild beasties are frantically topping up their winter larders and preparing warm burrows for winter.

Most trees have already withdrawn into themselves for the long white season, and their leaves have fallen, but the great oaks on my favorite hill are reluctant to part with their finery, and they are hanging on to every leaf. A north wind scours the wooded slopes and sweeps fallen fragments into rustling drifts and heaps. The air is spicy and carries the promise of deep cold days to come.

The festival (cross quarter day) marks “summer's end', the beginning of the dark half of the year. According to the old Celtic two-fold division of the year, summer was the interval between Beltane and Samhain, and winter the interval from Samhain to Beltane. It was also the gate between one year and another. For the ancestors, the old year ended at sunset on October 31, and a new year danced into being.

Some of us are enchanted by seasonal turnings in the Great Round and the old ways. Some of us love spooky "stuff", the fey, the mysterious and the unknown. Some like Halloween "clobber" and dressing up. Others are fascinated by the myriad ways in which the human species has measured the passage of time over the centuries.

The festival doings of the ancients celebrated pivotal cosmic points in their year, and Samhain was sacred to them. It was a fey interval in which the natural order dissolved back into primordial chaos for a brief unruly fling before regenerating, burnished and newly ordered for another journey through the seasons. They believed the veil between the living and the dead was thin on Samhain night, and that one's beloved dead could return for a visit. All the old festivals celebrate the cyclical nature of existence, but October 31st does so more than any other. 

In the last few years, many loved ones have left this realm and gone on ahead.  While they were here, they loved this world fiercely, and they treasured its innate abundance and wildness, its grandeur, grace and reciprocity. Lit from within, they blazed with life and passion wherever they went, and they lighted up every room they entered—it was always a little darker when they left. Somewhere beyond the here and now, my dear departed ones are still alight, and I try to remember that. My Samhain altar gets more crowded with every passing year, but there is always room for them all, and places will be set for everyone at the old oak table tonight.

Three cheers for trick-or-treating, tiny guisers and goblins on the threshold. What's not to love about witches, ghosts and goblins, grinning jack-o-lanterns, the colors orange and black? As I dole out treats to wee neighborhood friends tonight, I will reflect on the old year and tuck it thankfully away under a blanket of fallen maple leaves. I will think good thoughts about the cycle that is coming into being, and I will remember that endings and beginnings are natural and ordained parts of earthly existence, not something to be feared.

Bright blessings to you and your clan. May your jack-o-lanterns glow brightly tonight, and throngs of tiny costumed guests attend your threshold. May your home be a place of warmth and light, and your hearth a haven from things that go bump in the night. May there be laughter and merriment at your door, music and fellowship in abundance. May all good things come to you and your clan.

Thursday Poem - All Hallows Eve

Night of the void between the worlds,

night when the veil between the worlds is stirring,

lifting, when the old year shrivels and fades,

and the new year has not yet begun,

when light takes the form of darkness,

when the last light sinks into darkness like

spilled water, disappears in the leaves,

in the hot secret runs of earth underneath.

when grandmothers rise like mist,

the silent grandmothers with soft tongues of fog

in the ear, claiming nothing for themselves, nor

complaining that they were abandoned,

when children go out clothed in darkness,

the children with sweet orange lips slip among

whispers, go out with wavering candles among

crosses and mossy eyes in stone,

when children go out in the mist,

the children tasting of candy, of carelessly spilled

dreams, the children like faraway stars

flaming into the soft folds of darkness.

Dolores Stewart from Doors to the Universe

Wordless Wednesday - First Light

The Frosted Garden

Alas, the garden is being put to bed for the winter, and it is sad to be pruning the roses and cutting back the perennial residents of the bee garden for another long winter. As much as I loved the flowers in their prime, they are fetching creatures on an icy morning in late October, outlined in frost and sparkling in the early light. 

The Old Wild Mother (Earth) brings other gifts though. The winter bird feeders have been taken out and stuffed with the best wild bird seed I could find, and the garden is full of happy birds, dancing from branch to branch in the cedar hedges and singing their pleasure as soon as the sun is up. The seed is purchased in bulk from my local farm co-op and the bins in the garage have just been filled for the long white season. The winter choir approves of the menu on offer and says so.

Next up are the suet feeders, as soon as I can find a place to hang them that is not accessible to the squirrels - the little blighters have their own buffets, but they are never satisfied and always looking for more. Seed is also scattered on the deck for ground feeding birds like juncos and sparrows, and they are not shy about letting me know when their smorgasboard is running low.

Sequestered, Week 317 (CCCXVII)

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

I would say that there exist a thousand unbreakable links between each of us and everything else, and that our dignity and our chances are one. The farthest star and the mud at our feet are a family; and there is no decency or sense in honoring one thing, or a few things, and then closing the list. The pine tree, the leopard, the Platte River, and ourselves - we are at risk together, or we are on our way to a sustainable world together. We are each other's destiny.

Mary Oliver, Upstream: Selected Essays

Holding the Sky

Friday Ramble - A Later Shade of Gold

Many trees in the eastern Ontario highlands have already lost their leaves and fallen asleep in their leaf-strewn alcoves, but others are just starting to turn. Some hold their turning in abeyance until late in November, and it is a pleasure to see them in red and gold at a time when most of their kin are bare for the winter.

Whole hillsides of lacy tamarack are bright yellow, and their foliage dazzles the eyes. When I remember their splendor in the depths of winter, the memory will leave me close to tears and hankering for a long trip on foot into the forests of northern Ontario. I can almost hear the crunch of the white stuff under my snowshoes, inhale the fragrance of evergreens and fresh snowfall. 

Butternuts are always the first to drop their leaves, but the great oaks along our favourite woodland trail retain their bronzy leaves well into winter, and native beeches are wearing a delightful coppery hue. One of our favorite old maples puts on a splendid golden performance at this time of the year, and we attend her one woman show with pleasure. While in her clearing, we remember to say thanks for her efforts to brighten up this rather subdued interval in the turning of the seasons.

It has been a windy autumn, and it was delightful to learn this week that the north wind has not loosened  Maple's leaves and left her standing bare and forlorn on the hillside with her sisters. It (the wind, that is) has been doing its best, but the tree is standing fast. I would be "over the moon" if I could photograph or paint something even the smallest scrip as grand and elemental and graceful as Maple is creating in her alcove. Every curve and branch and burnished dancing leaf is a wonder, and the blue sky above her is a perfect counterpoint.

Writing this, I remembered that as well as being an archaic word for a scrap or fraction or tiny piece of something, the word scrip also describes a small wallet or pouch once carried by pilgrims and seekers. That seems fitting for our late October journeys into the woods, for our standing breathless under Maple in all her glory. Belonging to the sisterhood of tree and leaf in autumn is a fine thing.

Thursday Poem - This Time of Year

when the light leaves early, sun slipping down
behind the beech trees as easily as a spoon
of cherry cough syrup, four deer step

delicately up our path, just at the moment

when the colors shift, to eat fallen apples

in the tall grass. Great grey ghosts.

If we steal outside in the dark, we can

hear them chew. A sudden movement,
they're gone, the whiteness of their tails
a burning afterimage. A hollow pumpkin

moon rises, turns the dried corn to

chiaroscuro, shape and shadow; 

the breath of the wind draws the leaves

and stalks like melancholy cellos.

These days are songs, noon air that flows

like warm honey, the maple trees' glissando
of fat buttery leaves. The sun goes straight

to the gut like a slug of brandy, an eau-de-vie.

Ochre October: the sky, a blue dazzle,

the grand finale of trees, this spontaneous

applause; when darkness falls like a curtain,

the last act, the passage of time, that blue

current; October, and the light leaves early,

our radiant hungers, all these golden losses.

Barbara Crooker, from Radiance

Wordless Wednesday - Reflection

Hitching A Rosy Ride

Beau and I usually notice our neighbor's bright red Toyota truck on our walks, but at this time of the year, his whole yard is a thing of beauty. The old maple that spreads its canopy over his driveway is doing its autumn thing and dropping heaps of leaves all over the truck's hood, an eye grabbing performance if there ever was one. Rounding the corner yesterday and seeing the place stopped us right in our tracks.

Villagers like to compare notes on the colours of local maples in autumn, and we tell each other about dazzling specimens, exchanging notes whenever we meet on dog walks. The reds have pride of place, but the golden acacias on Byron avenue often get a mention too, ditto the buttery birches, aspens and ginkgos nearby.

With the slow return of the village and its wild places to softer, more earthy hues, a little red (or gold) is a fine thing in late autumn. Ivan's truck and his magnificent maple fill us with quiet pleasure, every time we see them.

Sequestered, Week 316 (CCCXVI)